India Burning

When the rice harvest season finishes in a few weeks, fields in India will turn black as farmers burn thousands of
acres. This practice shows one of the
failures of the Green Revolution, with devastating regional and global consequences. A food-security-obsessed India cannot ignore these
issues for much longer.

It
is rice harvest season in India. Never ending carpets of green fields are
turning gold in India’s fertile flatlands. In the occasional acre, contracted
field hands spend backbreaking days manually reaping and threshing the grain by
swinging bundles of rice straw over their heads to beat them down on a large
barrel. Traverse the Grand Truck Road through North India and find harvesting
machines called combines frequently dotting the horizontal landscape. The large
mechanical boxes move at a brisk pace across parched rice paddies, eating up the
field like a giant insect and leaving destroyed straw stumps in its wake. A
few days later, the sky turns hazy, the air develops a strange pungent flavour,
and it begins to rain unrecognizable small white scraps. It is ash. Plumes of
black smoke rise from a different direction each day, as farmers burn entire
fields to get rid of rice stems and residue. From an airplane window, the
scorched earth looks like a war zone.

India turns black twice each year, as harvested fields blaze across the
Indo-Gangetic plains in April/May for the wheat crop and again in
October/November for rice. Wheat and rice, the main staples of South Asian
cuisine, are harvested manually or by a combine. Manual labour is costly and
time-consuming, and farmers increasingly turn to machines to meet planting
schedules. Leased locally from business centres, combines reap rice fields in
only a few hours, work that once took several days. However, the combines leave
much of the rice stem and root behind in the soil as it harvests rice from the
plant, which farmers remove by lighting fires to quickly level the fields for the
next crop.

This practice is yet another inevitable by-product of the increasingly obsolete
yet enduring era of the Green Revolution - policies of the 1970s that conveniently provided national food security at
tremendous environmental costs to agricultural states. Facilitated by the
mechanization of agriculture, the rice-wheat cropping system became a dominant
cropping system with the government sponsored inception of genetically
modified, high yield varieties of rice and wheat that required excessive
amounts of pesticides and water. In the Punjab state, the home of the Green
Revolution and breadbasket of India, four decades of these intensive farming
practices have resulted in contaminated groundwater and rising numbers of
pesticide-related cancer. Water tables have also reached alarmingly low levels,
with the state mining its groundwater at an unsustainable rate.

There is no doubt that machines such as the combine have streamlined the grain
harvest, but their ineffectiveness in grain residue removal have left the
average farmer with little option other than fires. In Uttar Pradesh, a state
that produces and burns the most residues in the country, medical professionals
describe a steady rise in respiratory diseases in increasingly younger adults
or children. The fires also affect the lives of animals or birds and destroy
beneficial insects as well as topsoil nutrients, which then must be replenished
with toxic fertilizers. Burning residue emits large amounts of greenhouse gases
that are closely linked to global warming. Studies in several states now report
decreased long-term crop yields as a result of regional climate change caused
by mass open field burning.

Unsurprisingly, India is the third largest contributor of carbon dioxide in the
world, behind China and United States. On the global stage, India is also a vocal promoter of the environmental standards laid out by the Kyoto Protocol, but
is exempt from having to comply with them as a developing nation. Like state
directives banning open field burnings that go unheeded by its farmers, token
legislation is passed at the federal and state level but largely unenforced.
Agricultural departments at public universities, once set up by the architects
of the Green Revolution to promote its policies, are now redirecting research
to solve the ensueing traumas. The Happy Seeder, a seed drill that allows farmer
to plant a subsequent crop without getting rid of residue from the previous
one, is one product of academic research. Eager state governments have endorsed
the drill. However, despite the Seeder’s theoretical potential, its high cost
makes it unaffordable for the average farmer and is not expected to replace
open field burning.

Efforts at the local level are more hopeful. Where available, environmental
groups now promote biomass power plants as alternatives to burning. Most farmers are
unaware that grain residue can be sold to biomass centres or sugar factories to
be recycled into biofuel. Local non-profit groups also advocate organic
agriculture to reduce pesticide and water use. Dr. Vandana Shiva,
an environmental activist who fought the corporate biopiracy of native seeds, has
set up thousands of genetically unmodified seed banks to promote a return to
natural farming and biodiversity, and founded a college in her home state of
Uttarakhand to educate farmers about sustainable living and practices.

While farmers are adopting methods of holistic living through localized
advocacy, active government action and changes in legislation is still required
for permanent transformation of the status quo of India’s farming industry. It
is ironic that India’s food security is now at risk from the same policies that
helped establish it half a century ago. Prolonged pesticide use has
contaminated soil, water, and food produce. The country is running out of
groundwater for consumption and irrigation. Global warming, and respiratory
diseases are direct the result of burning wheat and rice residues due to a local
mindset for whom the practice is nearly tradition and an economy that silently
encourages food production at any cost. However, this practice is hardly restricted in its impact. The fires that rage biennially are a warning bell
for India and its 1.2 billion Indians of a potentially impending water,
agricultural and environmental crisis. One that, if ignored, could soon sound a
death knell.

About the author

Amritpan Kaur is a human rights researcher currently based in India, and tweets at @Amritpan

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